Additional changes to global governance will also be needed. These changes include the consolidation of face-to-face negotiations between old and new world powers (the US, the EU and China) and developing and emerging countries, including new regional powers like Mexico, Egypt, Turkey and Indonesia.
In this framework, the old G7/G8 can no longer function as a hegemonic center, but rather as a kind of broker and preparatory body. Simultaneously, within a variable architecture of negotiation, there must be links to the numerous conference institutions of the UN, as well as to political-economic regional associations such as the EU, Mercosur or the African Union.
This flexible (and, alas, fragile) architecture of multilevel negotiation can function only as long as it is oriented toward clear moral bases for negotiation, has sufficient democratic legitimacy and is supported in national and local arenas of action. Global leaders will find it significantly easier to steer toward big cooperation targets if they are supported by visions of the future within civil society.
A low-carbon society is not a crisis scenario, but rather the realistic vision of liberation from the path of expensive and risky over-development. In 1963, when the world narrowly escaped nuclear catastrophe, the physicist Max Born wrote: “World peace in a world that has grown smaller is no longer a Utopia, but rather a necessity, a condition for the survival of mankind.”
Those words have never been more true.
Claus Leggewie is director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen and a member of the Global Change Council of Germany.
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